People seem to be positioning wedding movie Bachelorette as a Bridesmaids knockoff, which strikes me as unfortunate, considering the former is supposed to be more acid than the latter, and the emotions in it are oriented in a slightly different direction. While Bridesmaids was about a rivalry between a bride’s oldest friend and a new friend to whom she’s become close, Bachelorette is about what happens when women actively resent a friend who they’re helping prepare for her wedding:

Weddings Make the Ladies Crazy is a cliche that’s made for a lot of deeply awful movies that perpetuate awful stereotypes about catfights and female materialism. I literally could not care less about Anne Hathaway and Kate Hudson go to war over which one of them gets to get married at the Plaza. But weddings are an inflection point, one that raises questions about where people in the bridal party think their lives are supposed to be, and how much they give to other people or how poorly they take care of themselves in times of stress, and that can make for interesting stories.

27 Dresses may have been dismissed as yet another Katherine Heigl romcom, but it’s also a movie about a woman who is taking care of other people to avoid pursuing her own dreams or taking stock of her own life. In Her Shoes, which builds towards a wedding, is a sly rebuke to romance dogma, which is that the perfect man will come along and accept you who you are and heal your brokenness. Instead, it’s a story about how if you want to be in a relationship, you have to get yourself to a place where you have things to give as well as missing pieces someone else can turn out to be. And I think Bachelorette could touch the third rail of weddings: the sense by a member of the wedding party that it’s inexplicable that the bride would be getting married before yourself. That’s an ugly emotion, tied up here in ideas about Rebel Wilson’s body and mien, and I’m kind of glad that the movie is taking it on. The relationships between women—and goodness knows, I’ve been a very happy maid of honor to some gorgeous brides—aren’t as vicious and divided as they can be portrayed in popular culture, and the profusion fo fake friendships on something like the Real Housewives doesn’t help. But there are real, painful dynamics there, inflected by societal dynamics on race, and class, and education, and looks. I’d rather movies mine the details of those conflicts thoughtfully and for specific drama, rather than not doing them at all.

Essayist William Deresiewicz has a fascinating look at the evolution of friendship between men and women in the New York Times—and a suggestion for why we don’t see these friendships in popular culture:

So if it’s common now for men and women to be friends, why do we so rarely see it in popular culture? Partly, it’s a narrative problem. Friendship isn’t courtship. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories about friendships of any kind are relatively rare, especially given what a huge place the relationships have in our lives. And of course, they’re not sexy. Put a man and a woman together in a movie or a novel, and we expect the sparks to fly. Yet it isn’t just a narrative problem, or a Hollywood problem.

This isn’t entirely true, of course: friendships have narratives and experience strains and uncertainties that can be just as impactful and interesting to explore as the stresses of new romantic connections. And one of the hallmarks of the Frat Pack and Judd Apatow is that they treat male friendships with that level of significance. In The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Andy’s growing connections with his coworkers, and the various ways in which they’re alternately respectful and insensitive, are the catalyst for him to develop his love life, and their friendships are almost as important as his first adult romantic relationship. In Wedding Crashers, John and Jeremy are the most important people in each other’s lives, and the movie is about how those friendships have to change when they start treating women as potentially permanent additions to their lives instead of as temporary interludes. I Love You, Man treats the process of finding a best friend as if it’s as significant as the quest for a permanent partner.

And even if you don’t want to do a 90-minute exploration of friendship in a movie, or believe that friendships are inherently less dramatic than romantic partnering (which strikes me as somewhat strange), that’s not an argument against including friendships between men and women on television, where they can be an established part of the background dynamic rather than foregrounded. New Girl, after a rocky start, has settled into a nice dynamic between Jess and her roommates, and has dealt with the sexual tension question by having the characters be honest about the fact that it exists while also being clear that they don’t intend to act on it. One of the many virtues of Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23, which debuts on ABC this Wednesday, is that it features a significant friendship between a man and a woman, the equally funny Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek. Peggy Olson and Don Draper are arguably friends on Mad Men, and this season’s Game of Thrones involves Arya’s friendships—or at least alliances—with men. These kinds of stories are far from impossible to tell. It’s not as if men and women who are friends are fictional creatures who have to be conjured into existence.

This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of House of Lies.

I thought it was smart of House of Lies to move beyond Marty a bit this week to start fleshing out the other characters. But the way it happened reaffirmed for me that the show should really be an hour rather than a half-hour, given how surprising some of the character reveals were, and how little we still know about Clyde and Doug other than a semi-generic bullying story.

First, take Jeannie. We’ve had essentially no sense of her personal life at all before it’s suddenly revealed that hey! she’s engaged!, her future mother-in-law is a drunk, and her fiance is a semi-conventional but very rich dude. It doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising that Jeannie is resisting introducing him to, as he puts it as they head off for their respective engagements, “these guys I share you with every week,” given that they’re jerks. But it does suggest that there’s a totally different Jeannie than the relatively restrained one we’re seeing as part of the team. The show’s version of introducing us to that side of her is to have Jeannie moon over a bad cafe musician in San Francisco all night, and then go to bed with him. It might be a meaningful sequence if we had any sense of Jeannie’s relationship to her boyfriend-now-future-husband and why she might be anxious about the engagement (given her behavior at the end of the episode, she appears to be hiding his very existence from Marty and company). I’m more inclined to believe Jeannie when she tells her hookup “You, this, tonight, and your penis, and your mediocre weed, they don’t have anything to do with my real life,” than I am to believe the musician who is psychoanalyzing her. But something’s up, and we don’t have the context to be able to think about it in a meaningful way*.

Speaking of context, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the dynamic between Clyde and Doug. Honestly at this point, Clyde may be the character I least enjoy watching on television, and as y’all know, I watch a lot of television. The hookup points schtick is sort of gross on its own, and given that we’re getting the impression that’s what Clyde lives for, that it may be the sole substance of his personality other than humiliating his friends on airplanes and giving terrible advice about “being Clooney,” he’s not a person I want to spend any time with whatsoever.

Doug, on the other hand, has some interesting things going on. His over-identification with Harvard is understandably irritating to his coworkers, but it’s at least an indication of some deeper need. And I appreciated the way he clumsily tried to step up with Roscoe tonight, whether asking if he needed to be watched going to the bathroom, hitting up food trucks with him, or solving his “case.” “There was a kid who was handsome, not in the classic sense but smart, but handsome, and smart, genius-level, and there was this other kid who tortured him,” Doug tells Roscoe. “He really just tortured him. And the kid’s mom was like ‘Stop all the crying, doug.’ But then this kid realized that the other kids were just jealous. That’s all. Jealous of his awesome awesomeness. He went on to be super-awesome. And today that kid is Justin Bieber. True story.” It’s a nice little moment, and it made me want to get some more details about Doug’s backstory. He deserves more than tics and a Harvard-seal-embossed briefcase.

Then, there’s Marty, who’s stuck with the client from hell, abandoned by his father, who’s left him “off to speak to a bunch of swooning Jungian analysts in Taos,” and feeling angry at his unreachable ex, who is”dependable, that is, in her psychosis.” He does badly with Roscoe in San Francisco, pawning him off on the team and feeding him out of vending machines, and I wish the show hadn’t pulled a punch by letting him off the hook for it, and having Roscoe over his bully problem by the time Marty got around to paying his son a little attention. I’d honestly watch a family show about Marty, Jeremiah, and Roscoe with a dose of Roscoe’s mother on the side, and even though I know this show is not that, I can’t help but treasure the moments when we see glimmer of the real pain, and fear, and love they’re all experiencing together. There’s something genuinely tragic about Marty’s rant on the phone to Monica that “You know what he understands now? He understands that life is unsteady, and full of regret and recrimination. You have let our son down because you are not there.” But like so many other things in House of Lies, this would be better if Monica was an actual person, if Marty had to take real responsibility, if we could spend time with the story of his mother’s death instead of some fraud-committing former-hacker twerp.